With the popularization of consumer digital cameras, image capture is ubiquitous. Billions of images are uploaded to online photo sharing web sites such as FACEBOOK® (social networking service), FLICKR® (computer software), and SNAPFISH® (image processing service). Consumer images can suffer from relatively poor composition compared to professional images. For example, the primary subjects may be too small a part of an image or distractive objects can be allowed to intrude at the edges of the image. It is desirable to infer the likely content of interest in an image to a photographer and make use of image retargeting techniques to enhance this intent. Many image retargeting techniques use saliency maps to infer the content of interest to the photographer. Many multimedia applications involving images may also either rely on or benefit from saliency maps that represent where important areas of images are located. To date, saliency detection techniques for images tend to produce highly blurry saliency maps.